Creating customer personas

Why?

• One reason is to better understand the customer's perspective. With a persona, you're imagining things through that individual's point of view. This is more specific than a target audience, which is more broad and general than a persona. When creating marketing material such as an advertisement or an email, you should consider the customer's priorities. Like what message or visuals will best appeal to them? Does it help them reach their goals or relate to their pain points?

  
  

• Another reason is once you understand who your customer is, it's easier to create customized content for them. You'll understand how they think, what they want to achieve, and what's holding them back from making a purchase.

  
  

• The last reason to create customer personas is for effective ad targeting.

Each customer persona represents an individual from one of the organization’s target groups. A target group is a set of people who have similar interests, goals, or concerns.

When crafting a customer persona, you'll need information about your ideal customers. You shouldn't just guess. You need actual data. The thing is you'll likely need to do research to collect this information.

Here are a few ways to do the research-

• The first is to review customer data. It's possible the business already has existing data about its customers. Review this for information for details such as demographics, location, sales history, and customer service notes.

  
  

• A second way is to conduct customer interviews. Like, consider interviewing customers directly about their experience with the product or service. Ask questions such as what brought them to the product, how did it solve their problem, and if appropriate, consider collecting information on their other interests as well to form a more detailed persona.

  
  

• Now, another way is to analyze web data. If the business is active on social media, review any demographic data about people who follow your business account. Additionally, website analytics, such as Google Analytics, provide data about elements like the age and gender of website visitors. If available, research online reviews and comments, as well. They can be a great opportunity for persona data.

  
  

• A fourth way is to send out surveys. A simple method to collect information is to email a survey out to current customers. You may find that participation is low on this particular type of strategy. So instead encourage survey participation by giving away something for free to one of the customers who fills out the survey.

Now, once you've done your research, the first part of creating a persona is defining who your customer is. This includes defining your persona's interests, traits, and demographics. Demographics are information specific to the customer, such as age, gender identity, income, family size, occupation, education, and location.

Now, the more detailed your personas, typically the more personas you will create. This aligns your advertising language to many members of your audience. Now, once you determine the persona's interests, traits, and demographics, it's time to get specific about their goals and barriers.

To create the goals and barriers, you should primarily rely on the data you collect about customers, such as surveys and interviews. For the customer persona goal, get specific about the customer and what they want to achieve. This goal needs to be related to the product or service.

Now, after identifying goals, consider the barrier, or what's preventing the customer from achieving their goal. You can also consider what's keeping the customer from hiring the company.

Now that you have the demographic information, the goals, and the barriers, combine that information to create your personas.

1. Who: Provide a short description of the fictional person that includes their name, age, location, household, and education. You’ll also include a photo. These details make it easier to imagine someone who represents an actual customer.

2. Goals: Describe what the person wants to achieve. This might include several related goals that apply to the customer’s life and your products or services.

3. Barrier: Identify a pain point that prevents the person from achieving their goals.

4. You could include a detailed description of the individual’s personality, hobbies, values, and lifestyle. Including more information can help you understand the customer better.

Now, let's imagine you've completed a few personas.A best practice is to keep them readily available. Whenever you work on any marketing material, consider all of your personas. Who are you trying to reach? What visuals appeal to them? What messages appeal to them? What online platforms do they spend their time on? That's the power of a persona.

Note: The process begins with researching and identifying who your customers are. Then you group similar customers together and create a customer persona to represent each group.